The hate-speech laced website is the creation of Don Black, a former Alabama Ku Klux Klan leader.
"We are saddened to see that hate organizations still exist. The fact that hate sites appear in Search results does not mean that Google endorses these views. Search is a reflection of the content and information that is available on the Internet,” a Google spokesperson told Sputnik News. “A site's ranking in search results is determined by computer algorithms using hundreds of factors to calculate a page's relevance to a given query. We do not remove content from our search results, except in very limited cases such as illegal content, malware and violations of our webmaster guidelines."
The company has long maintained that they do not support censoring or changing search results, citing concerns that it could cause a troubling trend.
During the election, Google searches on topics that were negative about Clinton would not autocomplete. For example, Google became the only search engine not to autocomplete the search term “Clinton Body Count.”
When questioned by Sputnik News regarding the manipulation of autocomplete suggestions about Clinton, the company asserted that their algorithm is designed to filter searches using an individual's name, along with terms that are “offensive or disparaging.”
This brought up a question of why offensive content about individuals is modified, while offensive content about an event, such as the Holocaust, is not.
This portion of the algorithm, according to the company, is specifically designed to prevent libel, attacks, and actions including revenge porn from being top results for an individual’s name. A Google search showing defamations is known to negatively affect a person’s career and reputation.
“The autocomplete algorithm is designed to avoid completing a search for a person’s name with terms that are offensive or disparaging. We made this change a while ago following feedback that Autocomplete too often predicted offensive, hurtful or inappropriate queries about people. This filter operates according to the same rules no matter who the person is,” a statement from Google read.
